My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.

  • Baggins@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She’s had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She’s going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.

    • TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it’s a possibility that even that job isn’t safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.

      • Valmond@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        And work with AI not against it. I mean if AI can quickly make a filler chapter that can be tweaked, more time can be used to make it all get together etc etc. Or so I figure.

    • livus@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing “literary” stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing…

      • SlamDrag@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

        Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

        • livus@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          That’s interesting, is this worldwide or just in your country (America?)

          I’m out of the loop, I had assumed the sausage factory was churning along ok.

        • funnyletter@lemmy.one
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.

          Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.

          I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.